Tag-teaming, poetic streaming, lamb’s balls biting, and an angel’s demeaning -that’s the evening that Kim Johnson and Jay Hopler created for faculty, students, and staff in a poetry reading hosted by the Learning Commons on Oct. 9. Douglas Smith, interim co-director of the Learning Commons, reserved 70 chairs in Founders Hall Gallery for the poetry event that he coordinated, and watched with excitement and pride as the room filled up and spilled over with additional people standing and sitting on the floor around the room.

“I didn’t even have to bribe anyone to come,” said Smith. While the guests shuffled in to take their seats, the two poets bantered back-and-forth about who would read first and finally decided with a coin toss (“heads!”) to read tag-team style.

This was not your grandfather’s poetry reading. The two distinguished guests did not at first glance appear so distinguished – how refreshing.

This is not to say that poets Hopler and Johnson aren’t nationally celebrated, award-winning, and renowned poets of well deserved distinction. It is to say that if you expected to see a silver-haired elder in a leather-patched tweed blazer and a schoolmarm with a tight bun in a buttoned-up lace high-collar, you would have been disappointed.

The air around these poets was filled instead with the youthful energy of blue jeans, a tattoo printed t-shirt, and Chuck’s Converse All-Star high-tops.

Hopler and Johnson have been sharing their work with each other for the last 15 years.

“As a result we have been writing (poems) in a form of dialogue with one another,” said Hopler. “She is my best reader, so there are only two people on the planet that I show new work to before I publish it, and Kim (Johnson) is one of them.”

The reading showed brilliantly how well they work together. It was electrifying to watch them build on the other’s momentum as they read in conversation, lending themselves to some humor as they went back and forth.

Among the several poems read from his book “Green Squall,” Hopler read “The Frustrated Angel,” an autobiographical work in which he converses with his guardian angel and gives a comical account of the angel’s viewpoint. He writes, “O, Hopler! If only sitting on your hands was heroic .,” creating laughter at his own expense.

To answer Hopler’s reading of “The Frustrated Angel” Johnson read “Babel” from her book “A Metaphorical God,” in which the speaker carries on her own conversation with God to question how one can think of holy things when it is so loud down here. She speaks of “. the air stupid with the shrieks of devils, – of angels, – .” The poem ends with a paradoxical thought: “who . can think of anything but heaven?”

The highlight for me would have to be Johnson’s reading that made most everyone squirm. She introduced “Marking the Lambs” to the audience explaining that shepherds castrated lambs in the past with their mouths, leaving teeth marks on their scrotums. She then read, “. teeth working, working, to snap back and spit.”

“There is no greater challenge as a poet then to follow up a poem on lamb castration,” said Hopler, to the crowd’s amusement as he announced his next poem, “Meditation on Spring’s First Green Fruit.”

Another entertaining set included Hopler’s “Gardening,” in which the speaker stakes tomatoes in a cool wet spring and contemplates watering tea-roses.

“That’s the kind of gardening poem you write if you live in Florida ([where Hopler is from),” said Johnson. “If you live in Utah where I live, in the desert, you write this kind of garden poem, where you rip out everything that wants water and replace it with things that don’t want water.”

She then read her poem “Ash Garden” in which the speaker blowtorches the front law. If you missed this reading, you missed out on great poetry and some good laughs.

So be sure not to miss the next two poetry readings planned for the spring. When “Douglas Smith, Tutor and Teacher Extraordinaire,” as Kimberly Garner, interim co-director of the Learning Commons, introduced him, is coordinating poetry readings, you never know what he will dig up for our poetic amusement